Census the lesser of two evils

Yes.

a) I'm less keen to give Arwen more excuses to waste time with his odd bs, and b) we're establishing a point here. That the Hobbit is actively and objectively worse than the prequels, which are themselves terrible.

 

FTFY

 

I'm not sure fixing it by using the very thing I rallied against is, in fact, "fixing" anything.

 

Happy harps? Arwen is wasting more time being strange, unable to relate to humans on any level, etc

 

I like the Jedi ascetic order as shown in the PT, because at least it's original and true to the roots of Star Wars: it's more samurai than wandering knight, more Tokugawa Shogunate than Camelot. I also liked that his Jedi were not the X-Men, like in the post-ROTJ EU, with each Jedi having a quirk or special power that they should totally have announced while posing and lighting up their lightsabers ("I am Kirana Ti and this is my hide armor, IT'S MORPHIN' TIME!"). Plus there was a solid plot reason they were weird and distant. Lucas got many things wrong in the PT. The Jedi Order? Not one of them.

Shaolin monks with psionic powers = good
Occidental ideals of heroism = bad

 

The only thing is I don't understand the relation between how they're represented in the PT versus William's score for Order 66. I don't think I'm supposed to care about the order's collapse in such an emotional sense, but the music begs me to feel something.

 

I have to agree that I was fine with the Jedi's portrayal in the PT. It really makes no sense that they would simultaneously have been itinerants and have hugely important roles in galactic affairs as Kenobi was suggested to in the original Star Wars film. One has to imagine a monastic organizational structure giving that influence a coherent structure and direction. That, consequently, is what Lucas gave us. It seems to my mind that more of the objections are about discordance with what people had imagined the Jedi to be in their personal fan fiction than any meaningful story telling reason.

 

Yeah the Order had failed so utterly by this point, that like most of Episode III I know they want me to care but I can't. Or won't. Whatever.

And fair call on post-ROTJ EU Jedi JohnTheShorts, but I was more thinking the WEG approach.

EDIT: Except, Wocky, the whole way the OT put them forward, the being guided by the Force is at odds with the extremely prescriptive nature of the order in the PT. They should have been less like the Purple Dragon Knights and more like the Order of the Radiant Heart with some Harpers thrown in.

 

What exactly about the PT Jedi offended people so much? The "no attachment" rule didn't make any sense and none of the characters ever even began to abide by it, but if one ignores that point I don't see what was particularly unsympathetic.

 

But WEG mostly played with Jedi survivors (or quixotic Jedi) during the Empire, when there was no order to support them, and that's when the Kung Fu archetype works most splendidly.

(Yes, I know about Tales of the Jedi Companion, I even own it, but the way they presented the Jedi didn't really work with the existence of a "General Kenobi" and worked better as what it was: a distant and mythical era. Plus it was based on tales written by the ******* that wrote Superman: At Earth's End and the ******* that wrote the Dune prequels, thus being inherently flawed and deserving of nothing but scorn, as I'm sure you'll agree.)

 

I think it's more the idea that they are essentially tied to the government of the day is what annoys me; WEG never envisioned that. Yes, General Kenobi suggests it's a blurred line but I'd always assumed it meant the Jedi could ally themselves with the Republic, not being sworn officers thereof.

The way it was set up, the Jedi couldn't openly mediate against the Republic nor could they oppose Republic corruption, which makes them political servants rather than apolitical monks.

 

Yeah, and the fact that it was never explained exactly what their role was, and that Anakin was babbling stuff like "Jedi business, nothing to see" (ugh) doesn't help much envision what's their exact position in relation to the Republic. That's a valid point, but I think it's more because of Lucas's lack of success in showing us what the Jedi Order was than in the concept itself.

Some of the TPM concept art had the Jedi dressed as soldiers, as UN peacekeepers, so it could have been worse.

 

Ender, I guess my problem with your vision is that I see few (if any?) historical examples of an organization being both essential to the functioning of a society and fully independent of its government. The power centers always tend to merge, or at least entangle themselves with one another in long run, such that the sort of independence you describe would be difficult to maintain.

 

I provided examples of non-aligned lawkeepers like the Order of the Radiant Heart, and to a lesser extent the Harpers. I also suggested that the de-facto role of the Jedi as the SWU Purple Dragon Knights was problematic for the reasons in my post above Daveeds.

 

Erm. I meant a real life example. A fantasy political structure built into a fictional history doesn't really help us get at the idea of whether it's remotely plausible or not. Whereas it seems pretty fair to say that if a model is functional, it probably ought to have functioned at some point in human history.

 

I think the concept we imagined (and that kind of ended up being) was something similar to the old monastic orders, mainly the Knights Templar. Independent, but terribly powerful and rich, two factors that would lead to the government starting a purge against them.

 

It's not plausible to travel at the speed of light either, Wocky (I don't care what VLM thinks he read to the contrary). Speaking for myself, I don't find the requirement to align to real world examples rates highly on my list.

Therefore, if I can look to Fae'run and say "hey, like that!" then I think for another fantasy setting - albeit space fantasy - it's appropriate.

This isn't sci-fi, after all. It's space opera, so fantasy is the comparison point.

I think a good interpretation of the way the order "ought" have played out in my mind (and others) might be the way int the Order is treated in The Old Republic.

 

That they looked like a kid's party?



The Popsicle® brand is an American classic, with more than 26 varieties of the original Popsicle® product.

Also: they look like monks, fine. But did they have to look like hermits roaming the Tatooine desert? This retroactively makes Ben Kenobi stupid.

 

Actually TCW made me feel for many of the PT Jedi as individuals for the first time, among other reasons because their treatment of the clones flew against the utter trash she-who-shall-not-be-named wrote for the EU and showed the Jedi to be weird, yes, but compassionate and with the heart in the right place.

 

That's a ludicrous statement. Anakin isn't all the characters. We saw nothing of attachments on the part of most Jedi.

 

TBF, if the Jedi did live without attachment, all that would mean is alot of molested young Padawans.

Something regarding the Jedi that rubs me the wrong way still is making The Force a quantifiable thing. It was totally unnecessary. The strength of The Force can be sensed. Vader did it himself in ANH.

 

Yup, the Hobbit is still "winning" this with 64.9% of the votes currently.